Threatening Iran and PTSD | PennLive letters

Earlier this year a former Army sharpshooter with a history of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) plowed his car into a group of pedestrians in Sunnyvale, California. The son of one of my neighbors served in Iraq where he took part in the house-to-house killing of people in Fallujah. Today he is extremely disturbed, homeless and totally disconnected from his parents.

According to the National Center for PTSD in the Department of Veterans Affairs, about 11 to 20 percent of the approximate 3 million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffer from PTSD in any given year. That means that from 330,000-600,000 veterans from these wars are fighting PTSD now. This can be compared to 7,000 U.S. troops killed in action in these wars and the 240,000 to 260,000 civilians killed in those two countries.

For a few weeks now, we’ve been hearing news of the imminence of war with Iran. This seems for the world like a redo of the Iraq war. Our politicians and many of the media blithely talk about how the U.S. may have to attack Iran--for no solid reason, apart from Iran’s having large oil reserves.

Last week Secretary of State Pompeo accused Iran of attacking a Japanese oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman with a mine or torpedo. But the Financial Times reported that Yutaka Katada, the owner of the tanker crippled in the explosion, contradicted Pompeo. Katada said his ship was attacked by a flying object, not by a mine or torpedo.

Iran had no motivation to launch this supposed attack, as at the same time the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Tehran--the first visit of a Japanese prime minister to Iran in 41 years. He went there to talk about trying to open a diplomatic channel for Iran. Iran would not have wanted to scuttle these talks by angering the Japanese.

The administration has no compunctions about creating its own fake news as long as it provides an excuse to go to war with Iran. Our military in the region continues to make provocative moves in the hope Iran will take the bait and give the U.S. reason to launch a full-fledged assault.

Have we the public still not learned to stand up to the purveyors of war in the administration and our Congress? Will war with Iran be worth it considering we can expect to have a few more hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers suffering from PTSD and a similar number of Iranian people killed?

Andrew Mills, Lower Gwynedd Township, Montgomery County

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